THE original Marsden House was Bolton's first fire station. A red brick building with huge arched entrance for the horse-drawn engines to pass through, it was later used to house various council departments before being sold for development 10 years ago.

But it has taken a decade and a lot of false starts before the new Marsden House got off the ground.

David Griffiths, MD of Marsden House Investments, the company set up to develop the site, said: "If we were doing it now, we would be swamped with offers, but back then, all the attention was on Manchester - and getting funding for schemes in towns like Bolton was not easy.

"For probably the first six years, nobody really had the confidence to get behind the scheme."

Numerous proposals were put forward, including converting the original building into student accommodation, working with a housing association to make low cost housing and even turning the site into a hotel.

But all floundered and eventually, Mr Griffiths put forward a new-build, mixed use scheme of shops and offices topped with two floors of apartments, a mix of one and two beds and 120 in total.

"Nothing else stacked up," he said. "We had intended to retain the original building, but it was unsound, so we put forward a new design, shortened the building so that we did not have to go over a culvert, and made it mixed use. We had to pre-sell the apartments to prove to the bank that we could achieve what we wanted to achieve."

Anyone who had the courage and the opportunity to buy into it will have doubled their money.

Apartments were sold at between £125 and £135 a sq ft - that's about £62,500 per apartment - and they are back on the market now for about £135,000, which shows just how much the market has moved here in the last two years.

And the £15m development in Marsden House has given others the confidence to invest.

There are plans to convert the nearby St Paul's Church into apartments and a Bolton developer has got permission to build 200 new apartments on the opposite side of the busy junction.

Paul Segdwick is the man who bought the Marsden House site originally and he said: "We had hoped to use the original shell of the building, but it had always had structural problems and just became too dilapidated.

"It was demolished four years ago and that gave us chance to make better use of the site.

"We put our toe in the water first and proved that town centre schemes in Bolton can get funding and can be developed.

"Bolton is the second biggest town in Greater Manchester, with the makings of a great café society. We just need to increase the density of people actually living in the town centre."

The penthouses at Marsden House, which are about 900 sq ft and have amazing views over the town are now on the market with Farrell Heyworth for £275,000.